Commercial Invoice Document Options

[Keto-BEAM]

I would like to be able to customize my Commercial Invoice (Other Forms) similarly to how most of the other documents have customizable options. I use ShipStation Connect to print all of my documents because it is very convenient.

Currently every time I print a Commercial Invoice it also prints a mostly blank page with a border that just says "Electronically Submitted" which is promptly discarded. 

It would be nice to select black and white printing. 

It would also be nice to choose to print multiple pages at a time as DHL requires 3 copies of each commercial invoice.

[acedeno]

Currently, we can't add notes or broker information on commercial invoices. This create issues for our customers who want to use their own brokers. We use UPS mostly and commercial invoices are sent electronically.

Also, we should be able to edit buyer/receiver as 2 different parties on commercial invoices.

[Moderator-Davis]

Hello @acedeno, 

Thanks for posting about this in the community! I definitely understand the desire to customize the commercial invoice. 

At this time, this is something that is created by the carriers directly and then provided to ShipStation during the label creation process. Due this, we cannot currently adjust/customize anything on the commercial invoice. 

I'm sorry this is not the answer you were hoping for in the immediate, but I wanted to make sure to update you as soon as I saw your comment. Absolutely feel free to post about this desire in our wonderful Ideas board so that our product team can review it for potential implementation in the future. 

[acedeno]

Hi Davis, I appreciate your reply and I understand the limitation. 

Since declaration of products/value, receiver information and other fields are being passed on to UPS to create/send back documents, are you saying UPS is limiting access to other notes/fields in their commercial invoice creation API? Can you share the specific limitation so we can put pressure on UPS to allow this? Thanks!!! 

[SuperMgr-Sarah]

Hi @acedeno! 

Davis and I were discussing this and I wanted to let you know that we are still looking into this. Most of what was discussed in this thread likely falls under what we'd consider "compliance" with international shipping (that is, what data gets transmitted and where does that data end up), but due to the holiday the individuals that would likely be able to tell us some of the specifics you'd like to know are out of the office. 

I'm going to follow up with them next week to see what kind of information we can provide around this and hopefully offer some next steps for you. 

There are a few observations I did make that I'd like to share in this thread for others reading it though.

1. I do see on the UPS commercial invoice that the recipient name/address is used in both the Ship To and Sold To areas. Often buyer and recipient are the same, but sometimes they are not. So I'm going to follow up to see if this is expected. 
2. The commercial invoice PDF file for UPS that you print through ShipStation does include 3 copies of the invoice - so you only need to print once and you'll have all three copies required. I do not know if the DHL commercial invoice also does this. However, if it doesn't you can always choose the browser print option instead of ShipStation Connect, and you can then use the "system dialog" to print as many copies as you want.
3. The UPS commercial invoice template (you can view a blank sample by going to the UPS forms library) doesn't include a "notes" or "broker" field (ShipStation also does not have a "broker" field) so I'm not sure where that data would live. Is there a different form required when a "broker" is required on the forms? If so, which form is it? If a different form is required, we'd likely need to update the integration, but that would require the UPS API supporting it - which I don't have a way to know if it does or not. 

If you can answer any of the questions I posed, that would be super helpful. Either way, we'll do our best to follow up with more information after the holidays.

[ap_ms]

Would love to bump this topic. I've been going back and forth between UPS/ShipStation for weeks on where I can update my commercial invoices to 2 separate addresses for Ship from and Sold to. UPS basically told me to handwrite it, even though they're the ones transmitting the information, but there is a Sold to: field in Ship Station which should be editable as well. Please help resolve this problem.

[MKUltraCorp]

Another bump please - our request is about customer email address. Every single time when UPS has issues contacting the customer, they call/email requesting phone (which is on the invoice already) and email for the recipient. Why can't we show the email address next to the phone number or something?

[MrCroquet]

Sarah,

We ship about 90% of our orders to USA from Canada. Any orders valued over $800 can be (and recently have been) stopped if there isn't a tax ID. When we ship to a business, we can include a Federal tax ID but with individuals, US Customs requires a social security number - not cool if you're trying to avoid identity theft. I'd NEVER give out my SSN to a retailer.

Our customs compliance specialist at UPS suggested the way around this is to identify our company as the "Importer of record/Sold to" entity. If we can modify our commercial invoice to reflect that - as you have suggested in your December post,  we'd be resolving one of our single biggest headaches.

If the contents of the commercial invoice are created by a blending of data from UPS and Shipstation, we'd need to know why UPS is assuming that the 'Bill to' and 'Ship to' are the same. In our situation, I'd like the 'Bill to' to be static, showing our company always in this field.

What did you find out when you followed up after the Christmas holidays?

Of course, there is also the other problem of the currency being shown as the shipper's currency when it should be shown as the buyer's  currency due, in part, to the fluctuations in currencies. Mostly though, its because Shopify populates Shipstation with US$ pricing. This problem has been discussed in a couple of other threads in this forum but nothing has been moved forward to date.

[acedeno]

Another bump. The sold to information in SS needs to add more fields for buyer info and to different from receiver information, and this should be properly populated in the commercial invoice. Most invoicing/ecommerce sites support this where buyer and receiver and not the same.

[Sofihas]

Another bump! SHIPSTATION DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! 

[Glowithus]

Hi - I would really like this option too. If the invoices are created by the carrier, then we would like to have the carrier include all of the information from the order on the commercial invoice. If Shipstation can facilitate this with the carriers, it would be very helpful.   I've been directly asked by FedEx to include the customer's contact email on the commercial invoices but have no way of including it as they are made during label creation and then attached electronically.  Typically the customer then has to file a GAA with fedex to arrange either fedex or another broker, so not having that contact info printed or a way for us to customize the commercial invoice is creating huge barriers in our business.  We've had over 30 shipments delayed in customs in the last 3-4 weeks, and have to manually contact fedex to provide the customer emails so they can then reach out to the customer process through customs. Please help, it's a massive time burden on the customers and on our staff to have to do this each time with fedex.  thank you!